Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar

This book is about four writers Sartre, Eluard, Blanchot, and CZline whose works confront and respond to the purge of collaborationist intellectuals in postwar France. It investigates how their writing argues for or against the different positions outlined during the purge and how it reflects or distorts the competing theories about literature to emerge from the trials. These writers were themselves involved in the trials to varying degrees: CZline was accused of treason, though eventually condemned on a lesser charge; Eluard, one of the leading Resistance poets and a Communist, published in the clandestine Resistance press and devoted a number of his poems to condemning collaborators; Sartre's theory of committed literature reiterates the theme of the writer s responsibility as presented during the trials; as for Blanchot, if his work never directly comments upon the purge, its arguments for the autonomy of literature are both a response to Sartre and a commentary on what Blanchot called the trial of art.